The first Academy Awards 'winners' were announced
on the back page of the organization's bulletin three months before being
officially awarded. Twelve award statuettes were quickly presented by
Academy President Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. - it was the first Academy Awards
ceremony, taking place at a private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt
Hotel on May 16, honoring films from 1927 and 1928. Paramount's Wings
(1927) won
Best Picture (based on production). It was the only silent film to win
an Oscar for Best Picture. A second 'Best Picture' category for artistic
merit (a category dropped the next year), was awarded to Sunrise
(1927).
Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor were the first Best Actor and Best Actress
winners - for multiple films.

1929

Actress Mary Pickford was the first performer
to conduct a marketing campaign for an Academy Award, in the second year
of its offering, by inviting all of the judges to her home for tea at her
22-room Pickfair mansion -- her ploy worked and she actually won the Best
Actress honor (awarded in 1930) for her overly-emotive performance in her
first talkie, the melodramatic Coquette (1928/29). Pickford and Fairbanks
also starred together in the box-office flop The Taming of the Shrew (1929)
- a misguided effort to bolster their stardom.

1929

Hollywood released its first original (backstage)
musical. It was MGM's first all-talking picture and musical -- The Broadway Melody (1929) (aka The Broadway Melody of 1929)
- a Best Picture Academy Award winner (it was the first sound film to win the award), and the first musical with an original score. It was also the first musical to spawn a series of Broadway
Melody sequels that stretched out to 1940 (the final film starred Fred
Astaire and Eleanor Powell). It was also one of the first musicals to feature a Technicolor (two-color) sequence ("The Wedding of the Painted Doll"), beginning a trend for other musicals to include color sequences. The musical film
genre was born with the coming of sound films.

1929

Director Erich von Stroheim's last silent film
Queen Kelly (1929), starring Gloria Swanson, (partial footage seen in Billy
Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), also starring
Swanson and von Stroheim), was not finished due to its expensive and elaborate
production, and disagreements between Swanson and the director. Producers
also balked at the idea of completing it - when the demand was increasing
for sound films.

1929

A 1925 musical was made
into a Paramount feature film of the same name, Cocoanuts (1929), featuring the Marx Brothers -- their first film. It was shot at Paramount's
Astoria Studios on Long Island.

1929

The first full-length, modern sound ("First 100% Natural Color, Talking, Singing, Dancing Picture") motion picture
produced entirely in color (two-strip Technicolor), director Alan Crosland's musical On With the Show (1929),
premiered in New York City on May 28, 1929. [Note: Previously, The Cavalier (1928), technically the first feature-length sound film completely in Technicolor, had only music and sound effects with silent title cards.] The second Technicolor 'talkie' film was Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), also from Warner Bros.

1929

The first important, feature-length sound documentary
was the German film, Melodie der Welt (1929, Germ.) (aka Melody of the World).

1929

The Eastman Kodak Company introduced its first motion
picture film, 16mm, designed especially for making the then new sound
motion pictures.

1929

With the school's launch in 1929, USC became the first university in
the country to offer a Bachelor of Arts degree in film. The school's founding
faculty included Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, William C. DeMille,
Ernst Lubitsch, Irving Thalberg, and Darryl Zanuck, among others.

1929

MGM's and director King Vidor's all-black musical Hallelujah! (1929),
shot on location, introduced post-synchronization to film-making. It was
also the first sound-era film with an all-black cast to be produced by a
major studio. The action was originally shot without sound, which was later added in the studio as a separately recorded sound track containing both naturalistic and impressionistic effects.

1929

The enthusiastic public demanded to see more
movies with sound. Theaters rushed to install sound equipment. Movie attendance
increased to 110 million, almost double the movie attendance in 1927. The
independent studios couldn't compete as successfully with the four major
studios (Fox, MGM, Paramount, and Warners) in the production of sound films.

1929

Walt Disney Productions was formed.

1929

Mickey Mouse's first words were spoken in his
ninth cartoon short The Karnival Kid (1929) when he said the
words: "Hot dogs!" [Walt's voice was used for Mickey.]

1929

Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929) was his
first sound film (and the UK's first full-length talking picture) -- and
featured one of his earliest cameo appearances
- a custom that would become a regular feature of his films (and the films
of many others).

1929

Soviet director Dziga Vertov's The Man with
a Movie Camera (1929, USSR) - a quintessential experimental, avante-garde film and
an excellent example of a "city symphony" documentary, was regarded
as "pure" visual cinema. Its views of Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and
of Soviet workers and machines contained radical hyper-editing techniques, special
visual effects, wild juxtapositions of images, and double exposures.

1929

Rouben Mamoulian's musical drama Applause (1929),
one of the earliest Hollywood musicals during the first full year of sound
pictures, was a liberating, innovative breakthrough film at a time of 'static'
and stultified film-making with bulky immobile cameras on sound stages.
He introduced revolutionary camera techniques (including rhythmically moving
and inventive shots, and the use of two cameras at the same time) and experiments
with sound (use of overlapping or interlacing soundtracks, sound cues, auditory
montages, and background noise).

1929

Silent screen star John Gilbert's first sound film was His Glorious Night (1929). It was a disastrous talkie debut for Gilbert - audiences laughed at his inappropriately-sounding, high-pitched voice in his role as a romantic hero. This common occurrence of stars having difficulty transitioning to the talkies was immortalized in Singin' in the Rain (1952).

1929

Dorothy Arzner directed The Wild Party (1929) - it was 24 year-old star Clara Bow's ("Hollywood's Whoopie Girl") first talkie -- a tale about "Jazz Age" youth in a collegiate picture that was exceedingly popular at the time. In the film, she played the part of a wild and sexy student who became involved with one of her young professors (Fredric March) at Winston College for Women. Clara Bow's sound career as an actress was soon doomed.

By the end of the decade

The film careers of many silent film stars
ended due to their voices being unsuitable for the new medium, or due to
the fact that their voices didn't match their public image. Others, however,
such as Greta Garbo, and the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy
successfully adapted to sound.